Dead From The Neck Up

A miasma of falsity was spread by those who assumed that their opinions were the same as everyone else’s – and therefore the only ones that mattered – such hypocrisy stifling every aspect of life. These purveyors of conformism did not know about the great majority of the people, and did not care to consider them as worthy of notice. When they did not fear or hate them, they wanted them to be in perpetual thrall to values which the complacent upper few per cent had decided, because they were their own, were the only ones worth living by. This included those socialist and left-wing commentators who also thought they knew how people ought to live, but would never live like it themselves. The country was dead from the neck up, and the body was buried in sand.
Alan Sillitoe